Dai-Jon Parker Wins The NCAA Title In An All-Funny Player Names Bracket

Filling out an NCAA bracket can be a time-consuming and
nerve-racking exercise if you put way too much thought into it.

You can sift through all the different ratings systems —
RPI, BPI, Ken Pom — trying to gain an edge over other people
in your pool, only to have your co-worker or friend who has NEVER
watched a single game of college basketball end up with a better
bracket.

Essentially what we're trying say is that the whole thing is a
complete crapshoot.

So why not just throw together a bracket based on silly
parameters and see what sticks.

For this exercise we picked winners based on the team
that had a player with the goofiest/weirdest/oddest name in a
given matchup. It's like taking the principles from the
college basketball all-name team and applying it to March
Madness.

(We'll be filling out brackets in strange ways throughout the
week and then keep checking them throughout the tournament to see
how we do.)

*UPDATE: As a few readers pointed out to
us, we confused our original winner, Nimrod Hilliard, as a South
Dakota St. player even though he actually plays for South Dakota.
We apologize for this error. It has been fixed. Thank you for
letting us know.

Among the highlights:

Double digit seeds did awesome: 10 in the Sweet 16, 7 in the Elite 8, and 3 in the Final
Four

No. 1 seeds did terrible, with only Syracuse (Rakeem
Christmas) and Michigan State (Keenan
Wetzel) getting to the round of 32

Teams playing in the "First Four" had some success:
Mississippi Valley State (Cor-J Cox) got to the
Elite 8; Vermont (Four McGlynn) and South
Florida (Jawanza Poland) faced off in the Sweet
16

A few names we loved, but didn't get past the round of 32 in
our bracket: UConn's Shabazz Napier, Davidson's
Frank Ben-Eze, and Martavious
Irving of Kansas State

The Final 4 featured Mississippi Valley State
(Cor-J Cox) vs. Norfolk St. (Pendarvis
Williams) on one side and Vanderbilt (Dai-Jon
Parker) vs. Vermont (Four McGlynn) on
the other

Vanderbilt defeated Mississippi Valley St. 1-0 in the
Championship Game when Dai-Jon Parker hit a free
throw after getting fouled by Cor-J
Cox

This is a completely RIDICULOUS, but VERY FUN way of picking
teams in your bracket

You WILL LOSE A LOT OF MULLAH if you go this route

Here's the full team bracket with results, click
on magnifying glass to zoom in:

ESPN

And the all-names bracket for you to look at
side-by-side, click on magnifying glass to zoom in (note:
teams labeled N/A only had players with very average names):